My Black Brick

I’m heading down to VA and plan to put the brick on jacks and paint the front wheels. I found a great thread on Turbobricks about repairing Virgos. Looks like I’ve got some reading to do.

Image from Crazychopstick on Turbobricks.

Now I understand why people need SUVs to go to the mall. It’s so they can easily pull back and leave after they plow over the cars in the parking lot, like this skilled driver.

That’s cost you $500.

Mecedes Benz will be premiering a new shooting brake concept this week in Beijing. Which raises a couple of questions: When does a station wagon turn into a “Brake“? And is it “Brake” or “Break”?

According to the Times,  “the brake body style…in strictest terms is a coupe with a squared-off back.” That slick vehicle pictured above doesn’t look like it started from a  coupe, unless you buy into the Daimler marketing-speak that refers to the base  CLS as a 4 door coupe.

As for the second question, it depends on which side of the English Channel you reside. In England it’s “Brake”, in France it’s “Break”. I’m guessing in the US it’ll be offered in gray, while in the UK it’ll be grey.

Great quote from Steve Lange about buying a new car, vs. fixing a used ride:

My heartfelt advice is to stop drinking the media supplied Kool-Aid, buy a tool kit and a Hayne’s manual, and start to get to know the absolute basics of your car. The big money is rarely made on the smartest customers. It is always the most ignorant and fearful that are the juicy prey of the marketplace. At this point you’re being a squeaky mouse in a den full of recession hungry boas.

Educate yourself. If you can look at a glass and see it’s half-full, you can easily read the coolant, oil, washer fluid, and brake fluid levels in your car. If you can turn a screw, you can also replace an oil filter, a battery, and nearly anything else on your car that isn’t a computer or wire. Buy a couple of jack stands, a $50 tool kit, a Mityvac, and that Hayne’s manual I mentioned earlier. The Rabbit’s are average in reliability and there’s nothing there that isn’t in 90+% of the cars that have been out there for the past decade.

It’s Checker Motors Appreciation Week over at Truth About Cars and they’ve triggered some bad flashbacks of Mr T and the Barbarian Brothers in 1993′s DC Cab. I didn’t realize Checker Motors made wagons, but I’m sure they worked great for cabs.

The 8-door Aerobus pictured above seems dropped in from another planet, however. Before there were Hummer H3 limos driving kids to their prom at the Jersey Shore, there was the Checker Motors Aerobus driving around vacation resorts and large airports. Unlike a limousine, the extended wheelbase Aerobus had forward facing bench seats, which is why it needed so many damn doors.

The Checker Aerobus Resource has some awesome pics of reader rides as well as a list of specs. Built from 1966 to 1974, this beast ran on a 200 hp 350ci V8. There were 6 door and 8 door versions built, with the 8 door having a 12 passenger capacity and a curb weight of 4905 lbs.

As if the original wasn’t long enough, this dude dropped $150k to combine two aerobuses, constructing a 14 door behemoth.

The US Army used this one to transport officials on a base in the US Southwest. Roof bins have been added because I guess there wasn’t enough room?

Tom Vanderbilt commends the old 240 in a parenthetical comment on his blog post about “car diapers”:

I often wonder why (most) cars actually lost their extruding bumpers to begin with (look at those big rubber bricks on old Volvos) — some push for imagined aerodynamicism on the part of car drivers I suppose.

Every day my gigantic rubber bumpers scrape a little more of the “Umbria Twilight Pearlesque” from the Infinity FXs  in my neighborhood. If people would just use those hideous Bumper Badgers, everything would be all right.

The NY Times documents efforts by some city dwellers to share information about curb-side parking spots. StreetParkNYC has an iPhone app website that allows you to announce when you’re leaving a spot. Another driver who’s in need of a spot can get info about the location for $5 and you would get a $3 kick back, with StreetParkNYC pocketing the remaining $2.

This sounds so creepy. Street parking in Hoboken, where I live, is pretty tough. It’s rare that you see an open parking space. Most of the time you have to catch someone getting in their car so you can nab the spot. I’m wondering how people would react if someone beats them to a spot they just paid $5 for. StreetPark claims their system would reduce fuel consumption and emissions, but it seems to me that it would just defer these problems to someone else.

Update: Caleb from StreetParkNYC responds in comments.

I haven’t seen the show myself, but it looks like the main character in the TV show “Medium” drives a nice gold brick.

As with most movie cars, the headrests are removed for good shots of the actors.

At some point the car explodes? Or is abducted by aliens?